Inspired by the season and by a wonderful day of reunion for our now-scattered families, I thought it would be good to say thanks to all of you who read, comment on, or otherwise interact with my writings here. When I began blogging over four years ago, I had no idea where the project would take me. All I knew was what I wanted to call my blog. Of that I was certain. I am grateful to all of you who’ve read what Gardner writes, and who’ve made my thinking clearer and my heart stronger with your responses.

As a Christmas present of sorts, I offer a podcast of the presentation Jim Groom and I did at EDUCAUSE 2008. The idea for the presentation was Jim’s. When he asked me to join him, I was honored to do so. I knew the collaboration would be something special: Jim’s an inspiring guy, and when he and I kick ideas around together, stuff happens. Jim’s the one who got me to try an alpha version of Lyceum back in the summer of 2006. When I returned to Mary Washington in the Spring, 2007 term, we had a hallway conversation in which I mentioned that WordPress Multiuser had gone to version 1, and I’d be interested in trying it out in one of my classes (as it turns out, my Film, Text, and Culture class). Jim installed it that night, I got going with it the next day, and within a few months our little experiment grew to several multiuser blogs in several of my colleagues’ classes in the department of English, Linguistics, and Speech. Over the summer, under the leadership of Martha Burtis the UMW Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies developed what became UMW Blogs, the initiative that continues today.

Doing the EDUCAUSE presentation with Jim took me back through all that history, and forward into the massive potential that still lies ahead for the whole UMW Blogs experiment. It also made me feel again the urgency of this effort to liberate students, faculty, and universities from the stultifying, even oppressive systems of “learning management” that continue to flourish in higher education, even when resources are disappearing and the prices keep going up.

For this presentation, fired up once again by Jim’s eloquence as he describes this oppression and the need for change, I hit upon the the idea of framing the Q&A in terms of an appeal to the audience, an “alter call” (pun and misspelling intended). Why not adopt an initiative like UMW Blogs? What’s stopping you? Why not abandon tired environments built around quiz builders and gradebooks and document delivery and find a way to bring the intellectual vitality of higher education, particularly as it is expressed in our students’ work, out into the world where it can find real audiences, spark real conversation, and serve as the foundation of a life’s work? Oh, and you can start the experiment for 6.95 a month, plus the cost of a domain name.

As you’ll hear, a set of concerns emerged from the audience: privacy, branding, risk, support, and so forth. These are legitimate concerns, every one of them. We must exercise due diligence in addressing them. Yet the larger concerns of authentic assessment, engaged learning, undergraduate publication, media fluency, and the like must not be overlooked. Indeed, these positive concerns–positive? essential concerns–should spur us to address and resolve the negative concerns. Instead, what happens all too often is that schools look for safety, scalability, sustainability (or at least that’s the logic) and try to fit the learning into the narrow spaces that remain between the circled wagons.

This can’t go on.

Whatever we do, whether it’s a campus-wide blogging initiative or something else equally ambitious, personal, and open, we must put learning at the center.  And that center must be designed to be shared. Easy to say, hard to do, and potentially glorious, as this season reminds us. 

Merry Christmas.

Photo by Bryan Alexander